Desert Rage

by Betty Webb

  “Their maid. Yes, I talked to her. But what’s a pre-audit?”

  “A check for discrepancies before things got out of hand. Or criminal. As I’m sure you know, fraud, or shall we say, ‘irregular disbursements of funds,’ can happen with any charity, especially one that size. A few times a year Alexandra would travel to BKDB’s various offices—they have branches in almost every state—to look over the books. She’d spend a couple of nights at a local hotel, and visit the bar. Every now and then, if things had been particularly bad at home, she’d take a new gentleman friend to her room. Being a wise woman, she never told any of her playmates anything about herself and she didn’t bother learning anything about them, either. She wasn’t looking for friends, just what the Bruce Springsteen song describes as ‘a bit of that human touch.’”

  Having walked a few miles in those moccasins myself, I could relate. Still, such behavior never comes without risk. “Did you ever warn her that what she was doing could be dangerous?”

  “On a regular basis.” A wry smile. “That’s what ‘besties’ are for, aren’t they? She claimed she took precautions, and not just of the condom type.”

  I stifled a groan. These days, all a bad guy needed to do to find out everything about you was to sneak a peek inside your purse. Or bribe the hotel night clerk to get your name and home address, not to mention shadow you as you went about your daily business. Alexandra Cameron might have been a smart woman, but she wasn’t a wise one.

  “Did she ever conduct any of these, ah, affairs, closer to home?”

  “Depends on how close you mean.”

  “Tucson. Flagstaff.”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Each place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about Phoenix?”

  A flutter outside the glass doors made Margie turn around on her bar stool so she could see better. The lone survivor of the hawk attack had returned to lap sugared water from the feeder. “Aren’t they pretty?” she said, ignoring my question.

  I tried again. “Margie, did Mrs. Cameron have sex with a man other than her husband here in the Valley area?”

  Still watching the hummingbird, she said, “One time, at the Wigwam Resort, way out on the west side. Nice place. They say Frank Sinatra stayed there once.” A look of longing briefly appeared on her chiseled face; maybe she was remembering freer days of her own. Straightening her shoulders, she said, “Anyway, after that, she kept her adventures, as she called them, farther away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as she was leaving the hotel, she saw one of her husband’s colleagues walking out of the bar. A Dr. Bosworth, I think she said.”

  I made a mental note of the name. “Did this Dr. Bosworth recognize her?”

  “She wasn’t sure, but the encounter spooked her enough that she never went there again.” When Margie turned away from the hummingbird, her eyes were bleak. “Not that it made any difference in the end.”

  I let silence filled the air for a few seconds until I decided it was safe to bring up something else that had been bothering me, yet another inconsistency in a very inconsistent case. “The last time we talked, you told me that Alexandra was upset because she suspected her husband of having an affair. If she was being unfaithful to him, wasn’t that rather hypocritical of her?”

  With an expression of deep unhappiness, Margie shook her head. “All right. I admit it. I was covering up for her, not wanting to tell you what was really going on over there. And I wanted to place the blame for their trouble squarely on Arthur, not her. Yeah, I was covering up, but so what? Alexandra was my ‘bestie,’ remember. What she really told me was, since neither she nor Arthur could be faithful to each other, it was probably best to end the marriage before more damage was done. Then a few days later—Alexandra being Alexandra—she told me she’d changed her mind, that the children deserved an intact home. She decided to try harder to make Arthur happy enough that he wouldn’t roam, and she in turn would stop having her ‘adventures,’ regardless of how lonely she felt.”

  “That’s a pretty masochistic philosophy, don’t you think?”

  She actually laughed. “There’s a single woman talking.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Marriage is marriage, and life is life. Neither is perfect. If a woman leaves her husband because there’s something about him that drives her crazy, chances are good she’ll pick another man who’s even worse. And after one divorce, the second one comes easier. And the third. And the fourth. Before she knows it, she’s racked up a small fortune in attorneys’ fees, yet her life isn’t one bit better. Ali has a friend whose mother is like that. Married three times already, she’s still looking for Mr. Right, and what’s it got her? A drinking problem, that’s what, and trouble with the law for giving alcohol to minors. So, no, Alexandra’s decision was not masochistic. For all her flaws—and she certainly had them—she chose the wiser path. And, considering the children, the more compassionate one.”

  Also, the more depressing. I thought back about my own love life. Dusty. Warren. The men before them. The good thing about being single was that when you decided to pack it in, you just left. No legal proceedings required. If you didn’t want to go crazy, you had to believe that somewhere out there was someone right for you, someone you’d never get to know if you stayed in your current bad situation. If you wound up alone, so be it.

  But Margie’s revelations gave rise to another suspicion. “When Alexandra decided to stay with Dr. Cameron, did she clear the slate by telling him about her one-night stands?”

  “I doubt it. Still, I can’t be certain.”

  When Margie rose from her bar stool and looked toward the door, I knew the interview was over. “One more question before I go. Several people have described Dr. Cameron as either aloof or downright cold. When he wasn’t obsessing over his cars, that is. His half-brother, who’s also a physician, thinks he had a touch of Asperger’s. Did you ever witness that kind of behavior?”

  She blinked several times. “Asperger’s? That would explain everything. Oh, good Lord, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself when Alexandra told me what he’d done, because it was so awful, so unforgivable…” Her face contorted into a mixture of shock and grief. “You…You have to understand, I’d never thought of Arthur as having a temper but never being downright cruel, so I was shocked when…” She shook her head, still aghast over some past incident. “That poor woman. And Jesus, that poor, poor kid.”

  “What did Dr. Cameron do?”

  “It doesn’t matter, what he did has nothing to do with what happened.”

  My interior alarm was shrieking. “Let me be the judge of that. What did Dr. Cameron do?”

  She walked over to the sliding glass door. Looked out at a new hummingbird helicoptering near the feeder. When it saw her, it flew away in a glimmer of blue and green. She sighed. “I like watching them, the birds, and yet I always seem to scare them off.”

  “Margie, stop evading my question.”

  With nothing left to see, she returned to the counter. “Now I feel rotten for being so angry with Arthur. If what you say is true, the man didn’t realize what he was doing. This was, oh, about a month ago, maybe a little more. First thing I need to tell you is that, well, as you’ve seen, Alexandra shared a lot with me. About everything, even the trouble she was having getting pregnant and what she and Arthur finally did about it.”

  “She told you about the IVF?”

  “Of course. I even helped her with the shots.” She looked at me defiantly, as if expecting some sort of negative reaction.

  Instead, I said, “You were a good friend, Margie.”

  She looked at her hand, the one with the wedding ring. “I tried to be. Marriage…well, marriage can be complicated, and over the years, I became as open with her as she was with me.”

  Tro
uble in Newberry Land? But I didn’t want to get sidetracked. “What did Dr. Cameron do that had Alexandra so upset?”

  She heaved another sigh. “All right. I’ll tell you. One morning Alexandra came over here in tears, distraught over something he’d said while they were eating breakfast. All of them were at the table, Arthur, Alexandra, Alec, and Ali. There’d been an article in the morning newspaper, something about in vitro fertilization, and Arthur became obsessed with the inaccuracies in the reporting. For obvious reasons Alexandra tried to distract him, but he just went on and on until he finally started comparing what was in the newspaper with what he knew and had had experience with. Unfortunately, he used Ali as his example. While she was sitting right there. Listening to him.”

  “You mean he let it slip that Ali was the result of IVF?”

  “Not only ‘let slip.’ From what Alexandra told me, he pretty much battered the subject to death, then took its corpse out for a walk. He yammered about how many intramuscular shots she had to take, for how long a period, and how the whole thing had to be timed with the egg donor, who was taking the same shots. He went on and on, she said, and nothing she said or did would shut him up.” She rubbed a trembling hand over her eyes. “God, that must have been ghastly for her.”

  And for Ali.

  “Did Alexandra say how Ali reacted?”

  A bitter laugh. “The poor girl locked herself in her room and didn’t speak to anyone for two days.” Margie closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were red. “You know what’s really pathetic? Alexandra said that no matter how often or in how many different ways she tried to explain it to him afterwards, Arthur never could understand why Ali got so upset.”

  ***

  Deciding that I might as well lump all the misery into one day and get it over with, I re-checked Jimmy’s list for the other two families who had lost loved ones via Dr. Arthur Cameron’s deadly services, and headed for the closest.

  Murderers cover the entire financial spectrum: rich, poor, middle class, and every financial state in between. True, the Death Row type of murderer was rarest among the rich, mainly because wealthy felons can afford better lawyers, but every now and then, one of them got himself—or herself—convicted. That happened to Blaine DuCharme III, executed May 1 for killing two police officers and a civilian in the aftermath of a bungled bank robbery initiated to feed his drug habit. There were so many witnesses to Blaine’s crimes—among them, three surveillance cameras, and two squad car dash cams—that his conviction had been a slam dunk. So great was the outrage among Arizona’s law-and-order populace, that despite his family’s money, his execution had been fast-tracked to a mere twenty-one years after his conviction.

  Unlike the families of Buelah Phelps, Kenny Dean Hopper, and Sidney Hoyt, the DuCharme family was rolling in the green stuff. DuCharme Chocolatiers, founded seventy-five years ago by Blaine DuCharme I, was Arizona’s answer to Belgium’s Godiva. The company started off as a small, mom-and-pop confectionary in Old Town Scottsdale, then over the decades, grew into an empire that enjoyed outlets in just about every high-end mall in America. But its very success guaranteed national coverage when Blaine Three—as the tabloids dubbed him—shot his way up Scottsdale Road. Somehow the DuCharme family survived the shame, and sales of their waist-expanding products continued to be brisk. Only one member of the DuCharme family, the younger brother, showed up to hear Blaine Three’s final words: “Personally, I always liked the white chocolate hazelnut truffles best.”

  The family immediately pulled hazelnut truffles from their stores nationwide, and hasn’t offered them since.

  No love lost there, I figured, as I approached Casa DuCharme. Like many of the Valley’s more expensive abodes, the house was located on several acres of scalped desert in far North Scottsdale, where blacktop driveways covered old Indian trails, and Cadillacs roamed where mountain lions once hunted. Kidney-shaped pools now replaced watering holes and gaudy gardens of bougainvillea drowned out the subtler tones of desert wildflowers. At least Casa DuCharme, a relic of the old Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture, had the decency to mimic its surroundings. A spiky, copper-clad roof echoed distant mountains, and sweeping glass windows reflected the remains of the ancient Hohokam hill fort on a rise across the way.

  I tried hard to appreciate the DuCharmes’ desert-sensitive efforts as I climbed the stone steps to the front door, a cunning mockup of saguaro spines overlaid on what appeared to be a rusted mine entrance. Before I made it to the top, a uniformed maid opened the door. At her feet, a gray-snouted Chihuahua yipped at me out of a nearly toothless mouth.

  “Mrs. DuCharme is seeing no one,” the maid said, in a Hispanic accent. “Please go now.”

  “I just want…”

  “I’ll take care of it, Lucinda,” a tall woman said, gently moving the maid and Chihuahua aside.

  Mrs. Lorraine DuCharme, nee Hillier, of the Santa Barbara Hilliers, faced me. She had once been beautiful, but was much less so now, and not only because of age. Already bone thin, sorrow had bowed her back and despair haunted her dark eyes. Even her voice sounded laden with tears.

  She wasn’t too frail for politesse, though. “If you are a journalist, please understand that I do not speak to the press. Everything you need to know, I said in the press release my PR person handed out on the evening of my son’s execution. Perhaps you did not receive a copy? If not, Lucinda can fetch you another, for I understand and sympathize with editorial deadlines.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not with the media.”

  She glanced toward my Jeep, which sat popping and pinging in the heat. “Are you having car trouble? If so, you may come in and wait until a tow arrives. This heat can be dangerous. Lucinda will serve you some iced tea.”

  Although tempted to lie, out of pity I didn’t. “No, Ma’am, my Jeep’s fine. The name’s Lena Jones. I’m a private investigator and I’m here to talk to you about your son.” Too late I remembered that there were two sons in the DuCharme family. The living one now ran the company business.

  But Mrs. DuCharme knew which one I meant. Her face shut down and she stepped back. “Then you have wasted your trip.” The door closed.

  “But a young girl’s life is at stake! And a boy’s!” I yelled.

  Nothing.

  She was right. I had wasted my trip.

  ***

  Twenty-three years earlier, Maleese Young, a black high-school dropout was convicted of killing his wife and her lover, a small-time South Phoenix drug dealer. This past New Year’s Day he met his own end at the hands of the esteemed Dr. Arthur Cameron. Because diabetes and heart disease ran rampant in the Young family, the only two relatives left to mourn Maleese were Janeese, his thirty-six-year-old daughter, and Dorothea, his mother. The two lived together in a small condo near Arizona State University, where Janeese Young, PhD—she never married—headed up the Urban Planning Department.

  When I showed up at their door, I was invited in, but only because they were initially under the impression that I had found proof of Maleese’s innocence. The temperature in the room dropped considerably when I set them straight.

  “If you’re not here to help us clear my father’s name, then why are you here?” Professor Young asked, hostility leaking out of every pore. Her mood was mirrored by two large black dogs that jumped off a chair and darted toward me, barking shrilly. They had all their teeth.

  I shuffled my feet just inside the threshold, wishing I’d found another profession. “I just want to ask you a few questions, then I’ll leave.”

  “Leave now!” she said, meaning it.

  “Janeese, you were raised better than that,” Her grandmother said, rolling her wheelchair forward. “And get her something to drink. Poor thing looks half dead.” In her late sixties, she was missing a leg, and her skin, once a rich mahogany, showed patches of gray around her eyes. She wore an insulin pump at her waist.

 
“Sorry for my lack of manners,” her granddaughter said, not sounding sorry at all, “but things have been rough around here since my father’s been executed.” She put stress on the last word. “But go ahead, take a seat, and I’ll get us some sweet tea.”

  Sweet tea. The terminology reminded me that the family had moved to Arizona from Mississippi twenty years before Maleese married the woman whose sins eventually killed him. Unlike Alexandra Cameron’s multiple lovers, Janet Young—Professor Young’s mother—was reputed to have had only one: the late, unlamented Willie ‘Pig Eye’ Wyms.

  “Tea would be lovely, thanks.” I hate sweet tea but this was neither the time nor the place to stick to the truth.

  She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to field the polite scrutiny of her grandmother. And the not-so-polite scrutiny of the dogs. They stared at me like I was dinner.

  “Have a seat, Miss Jones. I don’t bite, although Duke and Shasta might.” She patted the seat cushion of a beige tweed sofa. “You’ll be safer over here.”

  Although small, the living room comfortably combined two divergent tastes. A four-foot-high abstract sculpture of “found” materials stood guard in the corner, while a brightly colored African print scarf was thrown across the back of the muted-toned sofa. Dr. Young was probably responsible for the various awards and degrees on one wall, but I imagined that her grandmother had hung the many family portraits decorating every other wall. Most of the people in them, including the murdered Janet Young, were now dead. So was Maleese, whose smiles beamed down at us from five different photographs. Adorable as a child, he had grown into a handsome man.

  Maleese’s defense attorney had made much of his near movie-star looks, arguing that it was unlikely a woman would cheat on such a handsome man with the likes of the appropriately nicknamed “Pig Eye.” His argument failed, the jury deciding that there was no accounting for taste.